Play Design Added to Magic: The Gathering's R&D

More Experienced Players Will Join the Team.

By
Freddy Tan

In a recent blog post, the head designer of Magic: The Gathering Mark Rosewater a.k. MaRo announced the creation of a new team within Magic R&D: “Play Design.”

According to MaRo, the new team's function "is to be a group solely dedicated to the health of tournament environments, to make sure that playing Magic in structured settings is as enjoyable as possible."

Some of the names hired to run Play Design includes Dan Burdick who will head the team, Melissa DeTora along with Andrew Brown. It's revealed that more experienced players will join Play Design.

The emergence of this new group is likely due to Wizards of the Coast banned four cards within the past 1 year in the standard format - Smuggler's Copter, Reflector Mage, Emrakul, the Proimised End and Felidar Guardian.

One of the victims of the banlist.

It may have balanced the metagame to a certain extend by banning these cards and resulted in a more diverse format. But, many also voiced their concerns and worries - Players spent money to obtain powerful cards only to be banned later on is not very encouraging for the trading card community.

So, the question of "Why create the cards in the first place if they're overpowered and to be banned?" is probably the core motivation of the formation of Play Design. Let's hope that this new R&D initiative can ensure Wizards of the Coast that they won't make the same mistake by ban-friendly cards, while keeping the power level of new cards appealing enough for players.